By Melena RyzikNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Thursday December 27, 2012 8:08 AM

Few directors have the temerity to throw lines at Robert De Niro.

David O. Russell does.

Russell — the writer-director of
Silver Linings Playbook, which co-stars De Niro as an obsessive but caring father — had a
loose interpretation of following the script: He shouted bits of dialogue for his actors to repeat
as they were filmed.

“It had a certain chaotic, frenetic kind of energy — a spontaneity,” De Niro said recently from
his New York home.“And people would say that they didn’t know where it was going — which is a good
thing. It’s a very interesting, good way to work.”

His performance as a Philadelphia Eagles die-hard — who must contend with a lovelorn, unstable
and even more obsessive son (played by Bradley Cooper) — has earned him glowing reviews and made
him a front-runner in the crowded Oscar race for best supporting actor.

Not even De Niro — who has been nominated for six Oscars and won two, with the most recent in
1981 for
Raging Bull — feigns indifference to the trophy hunt.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said with his customary reserve: “It’s better to be acknowledged by
your peers than not to be acknowledged. Anybody who says differently, I don’t know what it
means."

The actors vying for nods with their supporting turns this year range from cinematic legends
such as De Niro to first-timers such as Dwight Henry.The latter, a career baker, rehearsed his part
as the dying father in
Beasts of the Southern Wild while rolling dough.

For the just-opened
Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino employed his rogues’ gallery of regulars — including
Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz — and encouraged Leonardo DiCaprio to play a flamboyant
baddie. John Goodman, meanwhile, was featured in two memorable roles this year: as a drug
deliveryman in
Flight; and as John Chambers, an Oscar- winning makeup artist who sets the Hollywood plot
spinning, in
Argo.

Unlike some of his cast mates in
Argo, which concerns the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, Goodman didn’t have to do much
research for his role.

“I knew people who knew of him, who were kind of grand descendants of his training,” he said of
Chambers, who died in 2001.“He was probably the first big plastic prosthetics guy. He had this big
laboratory in his garage where he made stuff.”

Goodman started his career onstage in New York, then became a beloved figure on big and small
screens, and a mainstay in films of the Coen brothers since
Raising Arizona.

“I have no idea what they see in me,” he said, “outside of a loudmouth who can fill up a 56-long
suit.”

He has never been nominated for an Oscar — not even as the ever-quotable Walter Sobchak in
The Big Lebowski. Perhaps no other star traveled further — emotionally if not
geographically — than Henry, making his acting debut in
Beasts of the Southern Wild, the story of a girl and her father in a tightknit bayou
community.

The filmmakers’ production office was across the street from Henry’s New Orleans bakery, and he
met them when they dropped in for pastries, chatted and left casting notices.

On a whim, Henry decided to audition.

Yet he was reluctant to leave the bakery for even a few months to do the movie.